All The Days of My Life (21 page)

“Nice to see her dressed for the first time for months,” Sid remarked.

“It's like having an unexploded bomb right in the middle of the room,” Ivy complained. “I daren't open my mouth.”

Jack was more confident than his parents. If it came to it, he was sure he could handle Mary. “Leave her alone,” he said. “And stop thinking about her like a cuckoo in the nest. She's doing the best she can. You can't expect too much of her – look at the size of her. She weighs nothing. She's close to being very ill. Is anyone going to pour that tea out?”

Mary came back, looking far from ill, and said, “Mum – Dad. I've settled with the landlord. I'm taking over the Smiths' house at number 4. He'll pay half the decorating – will you help me clean it up?”

“How are you going to cope with the rent?” Sid asked immediately.

“I've got a widow's pension,” Mary told him. “I'll get a little job somewhere. Stands to reason I can't go on living here. There isn't room. You can get your job back, Mum.”

“You'll live there all alone?” said Ivy. “In the whole house?”

“That's right,” Mary told her. “I'd ask you to come, Jack, but I want to be on my own for a bit to see how it goes.”

“All right,” said Jack patiently, although he had thought instantly that he would be more comfortable if he moved in with Mary.

“You can come and study there, see,” she said. “And keep an eye on Josephine some evenings, while I'm working.”

“That's all right,” he said.

Sid and Ivy, faced with their half-grown children organizing themselves so efficiently, sat filled with misgivings. Sid finally remarked, “I don't see how you're going to cope with the expenses –”

“I'll be all right,” said Mary. “I'm moving Monday.”

Jack looked at her suspiciously. He knew Mary had been up to something. “I'll help you,” he said.

So next day Ivy and Mary marched down Meakin Street with the pram, across which lay a new mop, by way of advertisement. They carried buckets and brushes and got the keys from the woman next door in order to let themselves in. They boiled a huge black kettle on the gas stove to get hot water for the task of cleaning up the house. “Faugh,” said Ivy fussily, throwing open the kitchen window and door to let in blasts of icy air. “What a stink. It looks as if they never put a damp cloth to anything all the time they were here. Look at this lino – you can't see the colour for the dirt. Put on that bucket full of water, Mary. We'll need gallons. I can smell that toilet from here.”

A pale sun filled the little yard outside, where grass grew in the
cracks of the asphalt. An elderberry bush grew from a gap in the broken wall. The women scraped grease from the ancient gas stove, scrubbed floors, tore the dirty, tattered net curtains from the windows. As they threw spirits of salt down the lavatory pan of the outside toilet the sky clouded and sleet began to fall. “It'll take days,” said Ivy, who was in her element – triumphant, vigorous, scouring out the stone sink in the kitchen, dragging a stained mattress downstairs and propping it outside for the dustman. Here was her damaged daughter, now moving into her own home, not two hundred yards from her own front door. It might have looked better if her brother had also moved in but you couldn't have everything, reasoned Ivy.

“I'll mobilize Jack and your dad at the weekend,” she told Mary. “They can start decorating. There's some nice wallpaper going cheap down the market –”

“Don't worry. I'll get it,” Mary said.

“It's your home,” said Ivy discontentedly.

She did not approve of Mary's lightly striped wallpaper, nor her insistence on pale paintwork all over the house. She nearly exploded when her daughter had a big bedstead with brass knobs on it delivered by a van. “People will think you're setting up house with a man,” she said. Nevertheless, she had to admit, when the house filled with pale, early sunshine, that it was a cheering sight. And by that time Ivy badly needed some signs that things were improving.

What baffled and worried both her and Sid was where Mary's money came from. Finally Sid confronted Mary and accused her of going to moneylenders, who would persecute her if she did not repay. Mary, child of her generation, which had never heard of the tight grasp of the local moneylender on poor neighbourhoods, laughed at him. “If you must know,” she told him, “I rang the local pub near where the Smiths are hiding out and I told old man Smith if he didn't send me a hundred pounds I'd let on Harry was with Jim that night when they did the robbery. I know he was because I looked out the window after Jim left and I saw them talking on the corner. Anyway, Harry told Jim about the load of cigarettes they were delivering there and asked him to go out and do the job with him. Only Jim refused. They knew there were two men there that night, and they took fingerprints. It could be nasty for Harry if I said anything – I couldn't be bothered at the time.”

“Mary!” exclaimed Sid. “It's blackmail!”

“The Smiths won't miss a hundred pounds,” said Mary calmly. “It
was Harry led Jim astray – now they can pay for a bit of a home for his widow and kid, that's what I say.”

Sid was shocked, not so much by what Mary had done as by her cool and ruthless attitude. But he went on repairing the light in the hall, muttering, “I hope you're not going to make a practice of blackmail, my girl.”

When Ivy came into the house with some shopping Sid told her what Mary had done. Ivy said, “Good for her – I'd have done the same, I hope.”

“You women are bloody criminals,” Sid told her.

“We've got to be,” was Ivy's only reply.

Jack came round to help Mary lay the new dark blue carpet in the parlour. Sulkily pulling his end towards the window he said, “I don't like this, Mary. Tugging this bit of ill-gotten gains about. What do you think you're doing, taking money from thieves?”

“Rather I took it off honest people, Jack?” his sister asked. She pulled her end into a corner and nailed it down.

“Don't nail it yet,” he said irritably. “It's not straight at this end.”

“It would be if you concentrated on getting it straight instead of lecturing me about where it came from,” said Mary, “And if you're so fussy why don't you go away? I can do it on my own.”

“I don't approve of blackmail,” he said. At this point the baby, in her pram in the hall, began to cry. Mary went to pick her up and stood in the doorway.

“What do you expect me to do, Jack?” she asked. “Sit on my bum in Mum and Dad's house, waiting for something to turn up? I've copped a hundred, that's all, off a gang of thieves who copped it off some other sucker. What are you going to do – tell the vicar?”

“You're starting to get hard, Mary,” said her brother.

“It's that or go under,” she told him. “I'm not going under and nor's my daughter.”

“You don't have to,” he said. “You've got your whole life before you. You're a pretty girl. You can find a decent bloke who won't mind about Jim. You can marry again.”

“Oh, yes,” Mary said. “I'm supposed to sit and wait in poverty until my prince comes along and kindly rescues me. With any luck he'll only tell me a few times a year, when we have a row, how nice it was to take me on, with a baby, a murderer's widow. If I just sit tight and keep my nose clean I can have that, eh, Jack? How would you like it yourself?”

“I wouldn't let yourself get bitter, Mary,” he advised.

Mary put the baby, now sleeping, back in the pram, and said, “Thanks for the tip. But if this is the price of getting some help with the carpet I'll skip it. No hard feelings, Jack, but you'd better go home.”

“Get back up your end,” he said, “and shut up.”

They got the carpet into position and started passing the hammer back and forth while they tacked it down. Mary looked up from her hammering and said, “The trouble with me as far as you're concerned, Jack, is that I don't fit into any of the categories you're learning at nightschool. I'm not a toiling proletarian, or a bourgeois or a capitalist, or any of that.”

“I dunno,” said Jack. “At the moment I'd call you an unscrupulous entrepreneur.”

“Sounds all right,” said his sister, slightly flattered.

After she had put together her home at number 4, Mary lived quietly. She cared for the house and baby, went to bed early and slept troubled sleeps, where she had nightmares about Jim and all kinds of confused dreams in which there were explosions, fires and sadness. She cared for the baby well enough, but if Josephine wanted smiles and tickles and golliwogs dancing on the edge of her pram and talking in funny voices, then it was Sid and Ivy, or the child's Uncle Jack or silly Auntie Shirley, who could imitate Donald Duck, who supplied all that.

It was generally assumed that grave Mary Flanders, little more than a child herself, was suffering from a perfectly natural grief. This may have been so but it was a condition more like battle-fatigue which Mary experienced. She had fits of the shudders. She went off into impenetrable silences. She was only half-aware, sometimes, of what was going on.

Then she heard in July that the barmaid of the Marquis of Zetland had left suddenly to go and become a dancer in the Middle East. The landlord, Ginger Hargreaves, was finding it hard to replace her.

Mary, seeing the job as a useful way of getting Josephine minded in the evenings while she supplemented her income, went to see Ginger.

Sympathetic to her plight and desperate for a replacement for the missing barmaid, he agreed to take her on. “I'm taking a risk, mind,” he told her, “because you're too young to be in a pub. But if anybody asks, tell them you're eighteen. And if anybody who looks like an official comes in, get out of the bar.” So in return for his kindness he paid her only two pounds a week, less than the other girl had got, and
from six until ten every night except Mondays Mary pulled pints and poured shorts at the Marquis of Zetland. She was fast with the change, never took a penny for herself and never accepted or helped herself to a drink. This conscientious attitude to the job, and her low wages, made up for the fact that she wore plain dresses and scraped her hair back unbecomingly from her face and tied it at the back with a ribbon, secured from underneath by a rubber band. She wore no make-up until Ginger said, “For Christ's sake, put something on your face, Mary. You look about twelve. I'll have the brewery round my ears for employing you.” Nor was she up to the usual pub chat: “Have a drink-well, have a fag then. Well, if you don't drink or smoke what do you do? Show me one day?” But in spite of her conservative dress and behaviour she got on well. The neighbourhood was beginning to admire her – until the Saturday evening in September when Johnnie Bridges walked in.

The pub was crowded, smoke billowed through the air, the doors were open, because it was a warm evening and somebody was hammering out “Bali Hai” on the out-of-tune piano. Mary had not noticed the three men walk in, nor had she heard the order one had given until a voice said behind her, as she reached up to get a double whisky from the dispenser, “Hurry up, Mary. We're thirsty here.” She turned round with the glass in her hand to see a pair of bold, almost black eyes staring into hers.

“What a pretty girl,” he said immediately. “Now why do you scrape all your curls back like that?” And he reached over the bar and deftly pulled some of the hair forward from behind her ears. He quickly did the same on the other side and said, “That's better,” as if he had known her for years. Mary stood there with the whisky glass in her hand. All the blood drained from her body. She felt as if she would fall down. The man beside the stranger took his glass from her hand. With a sidelong look at him he pressed the money into Mary's palm and pushed her fingers round it. Then he went down the bar and said, “Hullo, Sid. There's a geezer just come in with Marty Malone who's taken a fancy to your Mary.”

“I hope not,” said Sid. “What do you think of Villa this season?”

“Get rid of Armstrong,” the other replied quickly.

“You'd like to get us a double gin and two whiskies, I suppose,” said the stranger to Mary. Mary thought quickly; gin means a woman. And the stranger smiled at her, showing big, white, regular teeth and said, “My mate's brought his wife. She's a devil for gin. I'm on my own – I'm looking for the right girl. Maybe you'd like a gin yourself?”

“No, thanks,” said Mary. She turned away to get the drinks. Her hand shook. She put the glasses on the bar.

He drank the contents of one at a gulp and said, “Maybe a drink isn't what you need. You look like a girl who could do with a bit of fresh air. Why don't we take a walk by the canal? It's so delightful at this time of year.”

Mary, who could no longer hear the noise in the pub or feel her feet on the floor, just nodded.

“Come on then,” he said. Mary walked round the bar, dropped the flap in the counter and met with the young man's arm as she started to walk to the door.

“Here –” shouted Ginger Hargreaves, who was coming up from the cellar with a bottle of whisky in each hand. “Here – Mary! Where are you going?”

“I'll be back,” called Mary, without thinking at all, and went out of the door with Johnnie Bridges.

“What –?” cried Ginger, quite amazed.

“That was your daughter just going out the pub with that mate of Marty Malone's,” Sid's sharp-eyed friend told him.

“Who is this Malone?” asked Sid.

“Works for the Rose brothers,” the other man said, in a low voice.

“Known the Roses since they had their arses hanging out of their trousers,” Sid told him.

“Well – they haven't now,” said his friend.

“What's your daughter think she's playing at?” demanded Ginger, coming up to Sid. “She's leaving a bar full of people on a Saturday night to go out for a walk with her boyfriend.”